


Any Port In A Storm

by Helicon



Series: Saving Face [3]
Category: Elder Scrolls, Elder Scrolls Online
Genre: Gen, Kragenmoor sucks, Ressurective immortality, awful adventures of a Mainland Ashlander of the Second Era, death begins to lose its meaning after you experience it three times in one day, explanation of game mechanics, not The Vestige but A vestige
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-27
Updated: 2016-12-03
Packaged: 2018-09-02 17:16:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,032
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8675980
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Helicon/pseuds/Helicon
Summary: A test of how believable "I fell from the sky that was also Coldharbour, I exist but only in the same sense that your average summoned daedra exists, and I just want to go home" is.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is how I'm putting out my writing energy while Nethyn's story is on hiatus. Note that while this says it's part two of Saving Face, this isn't the continuation of part one. 
> 
> And now, for something completely different!

_ Year Two Hundred and Fifty-Five. You were born at least sixteen years ago when they took you. _

 

These things, she repeats to herself daily so that she may not forget them. The Daedra wants her to forget them. She stubbornly refuses, even as they slip from her grasp. The girl paces about her cell, scratches desperately at her arms, at her wrists as far beneath the manacles as she can manage, stomps on the hard ground to remind herself of its presence. Her cell mates, she herself, are long past the point of caring what she does. No one has told her to stop yet. It's been years, not a one of them has aged, and they are somehow all so much older.

 

_ Deshaan. You remember! The marsh, remember the marsh, remember the passing Argonians, the freebeasts and the slaves, their transporters, the repulsive ignorant traders devoured by the Ghost Snake. The womer always left, didn't they? They didn't press upon finding there was no male in charge. They did their business and left. _

 

She rubs at hollowed eyes. Yawns. Screams. Hers mix with others’, their moans and cries and ragged breath, the clang of iron, the heavy bootsteps of Dremora. The metal jewelry adorning her earlobes and forehead have remained despite the thievery of her clothing and its scratchy replacement. For this, at least, she is grateful.

 

_ Your mother was a good womer, an honest one. A huntress? What was it she did… her name! Her name. Se… Sevuuli. Sevuuli Surharian, an outsider, ousted, Velothi by blood but certainly no Mabrigash or Vereansu. The ancestors, the Ghost Snake, the tribe took her in.  _

 

A middle-aged Cyrodiilic man breaks down into laughing sobs for no obvious reason. Here, he doesn't need one. No one in the cell judges. An Orc woman joins him. They've been broken, or are in the speedy process.

 

_ Your name? Your name, my name, name… Edr… no? Adur--no, Edur--Adur? ‘She listens like she was named for it’, that was the joke, you made that joke! ‘Heria’. No, -heri. Adurheri. That sounds right. _

 

Adurheri swears she can see a fight break out in the distance. She swears it and then swears again that she's hallucinating again. There's a big woman, a very big -- ‘hulking’ is the word -- human woman, and a figure she can't quite make out. 

 

They disappear.

 

_ Adurheri, you keep your eyes on that now, you hear? When it comes back, get your eyes back on it. _

 

Moments later, the roar of metal doors giving and Caitiff on damage control nearly deafen her. The way out is clear -- in her head, not in reality. It must be to her acquaintances still in their right mind, for two out of the ten of them bolt for the open door, for the handful of others weaving through the fight or taking up arms against their captors.

 

Adurheri strives to be the former. Something in her cries out that it's suicide, or just delaying eternal captivity and servitude under Molag Bal, but the risk is worth the reward in her mind. She tails on the fastest one, an Argonian with a spiky head and face, so much taller than her. He looks strong of spirit, with a liveliness she couldn't find in her fellows before.

 

He notices. Just as a would-be escapee is dragged shrieking and clawing back to their cell, she is dragged into a pitch-dark alcove. When they return to the light, she can't read his face, but he doesn't rebuke her for continuing to follow him. 

 

Door after door -- he's broken his chains, his hands are free enough for a weapon as hers are but they haven't had the chance. They make it, barely, into a room that stinks of rot and death; the source -- a giant mass of flesh and skeletons unnaturally merged -- lies still on the floor. The strange person has leapt through a shimmering portal with a different, hooded man; the big woman has remained behind, bound to the portal by some profane magic Adurheri cannot identify.

 

She sees them both, but doesn't tell them to stop or turn back. Adurheri shouts what she assumes is a blessing in the tongue of the olive-skinned humans (they have come to the Vale enough) before she darts inside, the Argonian not far behind her.

 

The rush of wind whipping against her face, the drop, the water crashing hard on her body like a stone wall, all serve as the last thing she sees before warm lake water clouds her vision. Enough so, that she can see darkness creeping in, feel the air escape her, and briefly -- maybe? Oh, maybe -- some long arms grasping at her torso, clawed hands pulling her. Up? Down? It barely matters to her. It  _ was _ suicide, of course.

 

But the cultists already killed her. Stole her away, an unforeseen consequence for straying so far from the tribe. Drove a blade through her flesh and sacrificed her at the peak of that giant round stone.

 

So when she awakens, coughing and gasping, to find that Argonian standing over her, she laughs, hoarse and akin to the bark of a nix-hound. Drowning could not take her, and it was thanks to this stranger.

 

“ _ Thank you. _ ” The Argonian responds with something she does not know enough Marsh-speak to understand, but proximity and exposure has lent her so much as to thank him. Is he surprised that she can speak it? She can't tell, can't read his strange face.

 

Her head turns to the sky once more and she takes in the sun; a strange, alien feeling. It might have shone occasionally through the tree canopies and reflect off the swamp water, but Coldharbour had no sun.

 

Adurheri warms herself as the Argonian does. It takes the chill from her bonds and her bones, puts life back where Coldharbour took it from. The sparse grass around them prickles her hands when she touches it, the water stretches out around a little island in the center of the lake. She smells ash and smoke, that peculiar scent that the land takes during dry seasons, and in the distance, maybe food. A sharp, towered fortress looms far away, and a mer with their pack-guar appears to be approaching.

 

The Argonian has left. Fair enough to him, but to herself, she can't say.

 

On shaky knees, with shaky arms, she hauls herself to her feet and pats the water from her inner ear.

 

She calls out to the traveler, who still comes closer. “Hey, you!” Waving for his attention, and ultimately catching it, she yells in the closest to a House tongue she can get -- some Hlaalu dialect, she thinks, and it sounds much too short on her tongue, but the odds of them understanding are far better with it. “I'm lost! Where are we right now?”

 

_ You would trust this strange mer? The Argonian was safe, but -- oh please stop thinking to yourself, Adurheri, it'll only turn into you talking to yourself and people are going to think you’re crazy anyway if you tell them you just fell right out of Coldharbour! _

 

“You're just outside Kragenmoor, girl!” The mer shouts back. The voice is doubtlessly male. He hurries up his guar, approaches her, then eyes her wrists and body warily. Distrust in his eyes, in his long, bearded face, she can see it. She doesn't blame him one bit. She doesn't trust him either. “Where'd you get lost  _ from? _ I'm not helping out no convicts, I got a life of my own t’get back to.”

 

“I'm…” _Convict? He's glaring at your hands. That's like a prisoner, right?_ _That's… what I am?_ “I did nothing bad. I swear. I left my family for a walk and then people took me.”

 

He looks at her funny, one brow raised, mouth drawn. “Whaddaya mean, ‘people’?”

 

“I mean people,” she says, drawing a blank. “They were wearing strange clothes and came after me, and--” 

 

_ Cult. What's the word for that? Can't say they killed me, can I? _

 

His face swiftly changes, from a look of disdain and confusion to one of great concern. “Where'd they take you from?”

 

“Lower Deshaan.”  _ South. _ “Close to the Marsh.”

 

“Been talk of Dominion  _ n’wah _ in the fen,” the mer muses. “How you got outta there with your life, you'll have to tell me later. There's no room for newcomers in Kragenmoor, but I'll walk you up to the Temple if you like.”

  
Adurheri knows nothing of any Dominion, but she smiles, she nods, she walks alongside him and his guar. Iliath Temple, he tells her, is lovely. Big and sprawling, beautiful like a flower amongst the ash-plains of Stonefalls. She doesn't care for the Tribunal he talks about -- in her lifetime a few missionaries have visited her village, always eventually turned away -- but in the words of one cult she may find her answers about another.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alternative title: Don't mess with an immortal sixteen year old. You might accidentally be the one to give her that revelation and put her through a near-existential crisis.
> 
> Alternative alternative title: Helicon plays around with game mechanics in a way that might excuse them in-universe. For example, the no-penalty on-spot rezzing up to level five. Consider levels as how incredibly done Adurheri is with everything. I dunno. I haven't touched ESO in months. I should, but the updates have all stacked and all my friends have the DLCs that I can't pay for right now so it really isn't worth it in the long run. Fucking MMORPGs.

Stonefalls, the region the mer calls Varanis, possesses a warmth drastically different from the wet heat of Lagomere. Dry, smoky, due largely to the presence of the volcano the locals call the Tormented Spire. The farther northwest they go, the rougher the air is on her lungs.

 

“The name’s Savani, _sera._ Ral Savani,” he tells her. A guar herder by trade. He knows a thing or two about the goings-on in this place; not much, but enough. Kragenmoor is a Dres-controlled city, she learns, and the name sparks no recognition.

 

Kragenmoor is disappearing behind them. _He's going out of his way to help..._

 

It occurs to Adurheri to inform Ral that she was _not_ taken by any Dominion, that the people who had kidnapped her wore no armor but robes, and bore no weapons but staves. It would be the right, truthful thing to do.

 

But Molag Bal cultists would cause far more of a stir than something people are already aware and wary of.

 

 _And,_ she reasons, _he wanted to help you better when he thought the Dominion was after you. Keep it up for your own good!_

 

She introduces herself; Adurheri Surharian of the Mabrigash, and Ral openly ponders the lengthiness of her introduction. “All you Ashlanders introduce yourselves like that, huh?”

 

At first, she's struck with confusion: his terms are odd, and this is the first time she's seen ash outside a fire, never mind lives in it. “What are you talking about, Ral?”

 

“I mean, is it like your version of a  ‘House name, first name, last name’ greeting or--”

 

“No, no.” Before she continues, she adds, “Sorry I interrupted. Deshaan is a marsh, _sera,_ we are no ‘ash-landers’.” She can't control it; her face pulls into a grimace.

 

All he does is shrug. “That's what they are here,” he says. “Marshlander then?”

 

“I'd just like you to call me Adurheri, if that's okay.”

 

“Adurheri it is.” No sooner than Ral finishes speaking, the guar goes stiff and moans. He crouches down and strokes its head, muttering soft nonsense into its earholes, but whatever spooked it has done its job and done it well -- the guar bolts, its strong legs propelling it into the direction they were already headed in.

 

The two look behind themselves: Ral quickly, his ears perked high and distress in his wide-legged stance, and Adurheri, brief but alert, ready to flee as well.

 

 _Twang_ goes the bowstring.

 

 _Fwish_ goes the arrow, right between their heads.

 

Her gaze goes up the hill above them, in a perfectly straight line from the ground upward, and the sight of the armored archer crouching in the dry grass and nocking another, likely not-so-warning arrow puts the fear of death into her heart.

 

“Go!” she hisses at Ral. “Forget the guar, go back the other way--”

 

“But--” He looks back at the way his guar had fled. Animals, to their herders, are of great importance -- and Adurheri knows that, but another thing that she knows is that they've walked uninvited into Velothi territory (and these people, she supposes, are what Ral means by ‘Ashlanders’), and not every tribe is so outwardly benign as hers.

 

For example, this one. Whoever they are.

 

“Get--moving--!” She shoves the terrified mer back in the opposite direction, waving at their assailant, shouting apologies. “ _Forgive us, we didn't know-- I was showing him back to his people, didn't realize you all were here-- we’ll be on our way!_ ”

 

There must have been a severe miscommunication, or she wasn't moving quickly enough, because while Ral has made it clear out of sight, and she makes a note and a point to seek him out later and apologize for the trouble, the second arrow lodges itself in her chest.

 

A sensation not unlike the near-drowning she experienced just that afternoon sweeps over her. _I'm dying, I'm dying, not even a day out of Oblivion and I'm dying--_ She falls backward, thinking that she should be trying to get it out, maybe, but her body feels like it's losing shape anyway.

 

Shape and color, though the world is still so bright.

 

The arrow falls out, no action on her part necessary.

 

The world turns fully grey, she feels her body dematerializing -- _dematerializing?_ \-- to a certain point. Desperation kicks in. The overwhelming thought, out of _nowhere,_ that she's being pulled back into Oblivion by this process throws her spiraling into a panic.

 

She can't go back. She can't.

 

She feels like she's screaming, but there is no sound. Her vision returns piece by piece, and her ability to stand along with it.

 

Unnervingly enough, she's still semi-transparent.

 

The archer’s gone stiff, she notices. Some of their fellows join to see what the matter is, but are waved away, hurriedly, anxiously. She's afraid, too, but she looks up at them and just shrugs. The poor mer looks ready to drop dead as well, for as little as she can see of their face, and as solidity returns to her body, she watches them disappear into the distance.

 

A courage far better suited to an older body, or cockiness perfect for hers, overtakes Adurheri. “ _Yeah!_ ” she shouts. “ _You run away! Tell your people not to mess with Adurheri Surharian!_ ”

 

Her attention turns back to Ral, who is long gone, but that's okay. She knows her destination, she can find another way that doesn't go through this camp.

 

What must be Iliath Temple is close, it's in her sights. She keeps it there, as close as it can be to her -- the first real promise of safety in a long time. The faces of the cultists are fresh in her mind, as is her resolve to find answers, as she backtracks to find an alternate route.

 

As she walks, her bravery -- the adrenaline -- fades. The reality of what happened then sinks in in its place. She’d _died._ There was a moment there, between the arrow hitting her chest and her body doing that… reformation, thing, where she was _very dead_ and at the same time… not.

 

To think about it, it's exhilarating in a way. Terrifying, too.

 

_Am I still dead? It… it makes no sense. Can I not die? I was dead, I was… I have to still be dead!_

 

_Then…_

 

_What was I in Coldharbour?_

  
_What am I now?_


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> After multiple crises on whether or not I actually wanted to continue this while Nethyn's story is still being written, I finally managed to get this one out. Enjoy some Tiny Baby Guar.

She dies twice more before she gives up. Once, twice, from unlearned rock-scaling and slippery sweaty palms. The entryway to Iliath Temple is barricaded, furniture and wood slabs at any feasible entrance, no sign of anybody willing to take in an outsider. Adurheri stalks off into the distance in frustration. 

 

Wild guar grazing on a hill make way as she approaches, but not too far; just far enough so a perceived threat, though mostly unmoving in their direction, can't bother them. She doesn't blame them, by how angry she is, she must look or smell like danger.  _ Deep breaths, deep breaths, deep breaths. Do not spook the guar. _

 

In Deshaan they are a rarer sight, and they look nothing like this: not as light-colored, smaller, with webbed toes instead of giant claws. She lays there and watches them amble about, making their noises, snuffling as they chew. They sound so different from the southern guar. Raspier. They, like the mer, inhale the ashy air and their voices change all the same. They don't bother with her now; it's like she'd never interrupted their grazing.  _ They don't care what's going on around them. They just live. I could learn a thing or two from them now… _

 

Quickly she snaps back to reality. There is no reason now for her to use this ability as an excuse to be unobservant, not when she has a mission -- however self-imposed -- to accomplish. No reason to be stupid and reckless. No reason…

 

Kragenmoor is still to the south.  _ Did Ral make it? _ she wonders. 

 

There is a way to find out, but his comment about there being no room for newcomers resonates in her with a sting. But a visit can’t hurt, and besides, it's a city. There should be someone there who can free her of the cuffs that followed her from Coldharbour. 

 

When she looks at them, they send shivers down her spine. 

 

One little guar gets curious and leans its big head down toward her, sniffing inquisitively with its tongue out. She lays still and allows it, glances up at its face, sighs contentedly. “ _Hello there, sweet boy,_ ” she breathes, gently patting its snout. It snorts and huffs its grassy breath in her face. Is it a boy? Who knows; she hasn’t been learned in gendering animals, but this one has a much sharper snout than the bigger one it wandered off from, which must be the mother, if it’s still so young. Whatever it is, its long tongue lolls out of a massive mouth and drools on her cheek, laps her face, then sways its tail happily…

 

_ Laying here for a little while more won’t hurt, will it? _

 

She nudges the baby guar away and wipes the spittle off her face with the hem of her shirt. So many things have to be done once she reaches Kragenmoor, and now, finding some different clothes moves to the top of the list. Going around looking like a vagabond is one thing -- looking like she’s just come out of the jaws of some terrible creature, while not entirely untrue in the metaphorical sense, is another. She wonders briefly if she can just learn to make it all herself, or if housemer have a type of bartering system amongst themselves, and if she has something to give then maybe there will be something that fits her.

 

She has nothing to give. There lies the problem. A city has plenty of capable workers, sure enough, so not even her own two hands are offerable. 

 

Her options are threefold, and she considers them all: 

 

Find work. No work? Then make it. Be somebody’s student or errand-runner --  _ or, _ says a more selfish part of her,  _ help someone overburdened with their work and maybe they will help you in turn.  _ She entertains both sides, to her own shame.

 

Learn. She is still young and has plenty of room for it, and if she could remember what it was that her mother did, she might have been learned in some kind of craft anyway, had she escaped her abductors… it will help her in the end, she knows, but she has one more option and the least honorable of the three to take into consideration.

 

‘Adurheri Surharian is no thief’ is not a concrete statement. Never in her life has she had reason to think about it, much less to actually want to act on it. It poses the most danger of her three options, showing the ugly threat of punishment -- which she knows nothing of in the way that the housemer define it (which is also a mystery to her). Would they kill her? Leave her to learn her lesson or re-pilfer? The thought makes her sick.  _ It shouldn't have to come to that. _

 

_ Make it to Kragenmoor, _ she thinks.  _ Decide then. No reason to be stupid and reckless. _

 

The sun is beginning to set, spreading a slight chill over the area, and putting dread in Adurheri’s heart. She was so used to the sight of the sun, and so soon, it was gone.

 

It will come back.

 

She'll live.

 

Where she'll sleep tonight is another story. 

 

The sun has yet to rise, but still Adurheri wakes up. Finding the guar much too bothersome to fall asleep amongst, the night before she'd set off once more in the direction of the city, and after half the night, had passed out dead-tired on the stone steps of a well-looking structure. The blue glow drew her to it like a moth to flame, and so she had chosen that place to sleep, feeling safer than ever before.

 

The feeling has stayed with her through waking, and though she is alone in the dark, she knows by that feeling alone that this is a good place.

 

An ominous-looking ruin lies nearby. On her way southeast she chooses to bypass it, though not without thinking to come back and investigate later. Like the well, it draws her inward, but the temptation to go to it is far easier to resist. 

 

The darkness suddenly overwhelms her with daybreak nowhere in sight. She makes a break back towards the well, feeling watched by nothing that she can see. To be out in the dark like this… it's a mistake. It's a mistake. She clings to the blue-lit brazier, though she can no longer sleep, and watches the night.

 

A group of sleeping netch drift nearby. The rumbling snores of kagouti, peaceful for once, reverberate in the air and send a chill down her spine all the same as their snarls.

 

It will be a long night.

 

* * *

 

When she finally arrives in Kragenmoor, near evening the next day, it stifles her immediately. The way she had opted to come in must have been the wrong way; it stinks like the back end of a sick rat, mixed with something unbearably sweet and left to sit in the hot Stonefalls sun. Ral must have been sparing her an experience like this by advising her against coming here. Ragged-looking catfolk --  _ Khajiit _ , she thinks they are; she’s seen but one in her life and even then it was only in an illustrated book she once convinced a visitor to show her -- prowl about, some at rest in a sparse, hay-filled, open-walled building. All of them wear a metal bracer not too dissimilar to what Adurheri is subconsciously rubbing beneath to get to her own wrists, to get feeling to flow back there.

 

_ They’re like the Argonians, _ she realizes. Eye-contact with one of the Dres-slaves expertly avoided, she darts toward a stairwell…

 

...and directly into the solid breastplate of a city guard.

 

She stares up with a healthy mix of apprehension and fear into his piercing eyes, and backs up, swearing up and down the best she can that she didn't mean it, and was only searching for her friend. It really isn't as bad as it looks. She isn't as bad as she looks.

 

“What friend?” His tone leaves unfortunately ample room for guessing at whether or not he means to help her. 

 

“Ral Savani.” Knowing that it can't hurt her case to try, Adurheri launches into a fairly well-spun fabrication, the story Ral had assumed: she was a detainee of the Dominion. She tells him of their presence on the border of Shadowfen and Deshaan (there is no way she can know this to be true, but Ral’s words and his rumors lent credence to the assumption), how she'd escaped and ran north, too far north in trying to escape them fully. Ral had offered to take her to the Temple for shelter, but she'd found it to be barricaded, under siege, inaccessible and that's why she is here, you see? 

 

She slips in and out of Housespeak, which does not escape the guard nor his companion, and they are well taken aback by her news of the Temple, but eventually they do let her through with a warning:

  
“We’ll be watching you.”


End file.
